Ruth Fischer

Ruth Fischer (11 December 1895-13 March 1961) was a co-founder of the Communist Party of Austria. Despite her socialist convictions, she later opposed the party, and she became an American spy during the Cold War.

Biography
Elfriede Eisler was born in Leipzig, Saxony, German Empire on 11 December 1895, the daughter of a Jewish father and a Lutheran mother; she was the sister of communist activist Gerhart Eisler. She took on the pen name "Ruth Fischer" and became leader of the Berlin branch of the Communist Party of Germany in 1921. The German authorities attempted to repatriate her to Austria, where she married a communist who was murdered in 1937 during the Great Purge. She would later denounce the KPD leaders for making concessions to social democracy, for opportunism, and for revisionism, and she appealed to Nazi Party students in 1923, telling them to "throw down the Jewish capitalists, hang them from the lamp-post, stamp on them." In April 1924, she became co-chairperson of the KPD, and she was imprisoned in the Russian SFSR for ten months for attempting to defend fellow communist politician Arkadi Maslow. In August 1926, they were expelled from the party, and she was a member of the Reichstag from 1924 to 1928 and the Prussian House of Representatives at the same time. She fled to Paris in 1933 and to the USA in 1941, and she testified against her brothers before HUAC in 1947. She died in Paris in 1961 at the age of 65, having been condemned as a Trotskyist by the Soviet Union.